Pretty much for my entire career in Linux USB (eight years now?), we've been complaining about how USB device power management just sucks. We enable auto-suspend for a USB device driver, and find dozens of different USB devices that simply disconnect from the bus when auto-suspend is enabled.

For years, we've blamed those devices for being cheap, crappy, and broken. We talked about blacklists in the kernel, and ripped those out when they got too big. We've talked about whitelists in userspace, but not many distros have time to cultivate such lists.

In response to the posts seemingly praising open source... It's not exactly rocket science to figure out some open source stuff works better and some closed source stuff works better, and it's not the openness or closeness that makes that statement true.

If you work on anything that goes into the linux kernel, you will know that the open nature of it can also be its biggest drawback. There's constant bickering about how something should be done. So much to the point that it puts off great coders and much more elegant approaches. Linux is riddled with compromise, poor approaches, poor implementations, backwards thinking, etc. The one good thing however is that you're able to fix all the dumb crap yourself thanks to its openness. Ultimately both openness and closeness are blessings & curses.

How good/trash software is really depends on the decisions that have been made starting from the ground up.